Along with increased availability of digital media of all types and varieties, devices for rendering the media have proliferated as well. And yet, for all of such proliferation, the hierarchical model applied to the user interface for navigating the media has remained largely the same. This is of particular disadvantage to those users with a great quantity of media through which it is desirable to navigate. Under the traditional hierarchical model for navigating media, a user first selects a top level category, such as “Albums,” or “Artists,” or “All Songs.” A list is associated with the top level category, and the user selects an element from the list. Then, there may be one or more sub-categories associated with the element selected, all of equal hierarchical weight. For instance, in the case of the selection of a particular Album from a list of Albums, a list of songs associated with the selected Album appears for the user's further selection. Since generally, a “song” is the atomic element of music navigation, there is no further sub-navigation, and selection of the song results in its being rendered, or otherwise selected for some operation. This type of navigation is not that much different than the navigation of a traditional hierarchical file management system, wherein a folder is selected, and then sub-folders of equal hierarchical weight appear, and sub-folders can be selected with similar drilling down until atomic elements, such as files, that can not be subdivided further are reached.
For a particular example of a traditional music hierarchy navigation of a user interface, FIG. 1A illustrates a navigation starting with the “Artist,” users navigate on a screen by screen basis from FIG. 1A to FIG. 1D. The bolded element of the media user interface MUI1 represents a selected element, or an element which is to be selected to produce the next screen. Thus, in the traditional case, after a user selected “Artist” in the top-level screen, a list of Artists appears in FIG. 1B, reflecting the user's choice. After the user selects Artist1 from the list of Artists, a list of Albums associated with Artist1 appears in FIG. 1C. From that list of Albums, a user may select an Album of choice, in this case Album1, and as a result, finally, in FIG. 1D, a list of songs associated with the Album is displayed. A selection from the list of FIG. 1D typically results in the playing of the song.
With a hierarchical menu such as this, a user moves forward through and backs out of the various levels of hierarchy in order to reach a particular song or set of songs. Essentially, navigation is unidirectional, i.e., navigation is either moving towards the more specific, or the more general. While this model works alright when a user is navigating a manageable number of songs, this model is too rigid, static and inflexible when navigating thousands and thousands of songs. Finding any particular atomic element, e.g., a song, may prove too cumbersome and frustrate a user. This is particularly true when the device is a handheld device with limited screen real estate for the user to see at one time. Representing such deep hierarchies on a mobile device screen or even on a Television from 10 feet away can post a challenge due to the number of steps involved, and the unavailability of the previous step for reference. When only a handful of songs can be displayed to a user at a time due to the size of the device, one can appreciate the need for a top notch user interface experience.
Another technique for finding a particular media element amidst a vast quantity of media is to simply search upon a name associated with the desired media element. For instance, the user may not know the name of a desired song, but the user may know the artist or the album. By text searching on the media store, a set of candidates can be displayed to the user. Regretfully, this is an error prone process, and requires the user to know something about the targeted media. This is also not prone to easily displaying a related set of songs desired by the user. Additionally, on a small device, such as an Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) Audio Layer 3 (MP3) player or a handheld Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) player, the means for inputting into the device may itself be limited, i.e., the device may not have a keyboard, and if it does, the keyboard keys tend to be small, and thus prone to slow, error prone entry. Accordingly, it is clear that text searching is not an adequate method of searching for and playing media via a user interface.
As a consequence, there is a need for a rich user experience when navigating media on a user interface of a computing device. More particularly, there is need for an improved user interface experience for media on a handheld device with limited input and output representational capacities, e.g., due to a limited screen resolution or size, or due to limited input device capabilities.